No need to spend precious time here selling you on why you would want or need your iPad to convert itself into a fully featured sketchbook. I’ve been searching for the best way to accomplish this for…well as long as I’ve had my iPad 2.

Wacom Bamboo Pen

First I came across a Best Buy gift card and a small discovery on the bottom shelf of the accessories aisle. Wacom Bamboo Pen. Huge upgrade from the finger, though at $40 it’s a bit pricey. Buy Now $39.99

SketchBook Pro for iPad

Once brought it home I fished thru 3 or 4 different drawing apps, mostly free, just to test out the pen. None of the apps did much of anything dynamic with the brushes and I was pretty disappointed at first. That is until I did a little consumer research and found that the general consensus was to download this app called SketchBook Pro for iPad. It was $2 that day, a sale, since today it’s back to $5. Either way it’s amazing. Buy Now $4.99

So I got to Sketching and was baffled by the variety of brushes this thing offered. Plus it allows for multiple layers and the ability to set those layers blending options. I finally felt like I had something comparable to Photoshop on my iPad.

The interface is clean and easy to use, leaving multiple tool options for you to optimize your workspace. It took probably 3 hours to really get into my groove on this first painting but it was smooth sailing from there.

My First Sketch

The same night I came home with my new Wacom Pen I also sat down to watch Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia”, the imagery throughout was striking and I thought what better way to get started with my new app? So I sat down and sketched out a surrealist shot of our un-hinged blonde (Kirsten Dunst) getting intimate with impending doom of the planet Melancholia. If this has you in any way intrigued I recommend getting on Netflix Instant and checking it out.

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to take your featured post images a step beyond the typical usage of a static image block. We will be using our featured image as a custom background graphic.

Adding Thumbnail support to your theme

<?php add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' ); ?>

Head over to your functions.php file and insert the short snippet above. You should now see this box in the lower right corner or your “Add New Post” page in the WordPress dashboard.

Calling Your Featured Image URL – In The Loop

<?php $image_id = get_post_thumbnail_id(); ?>
<?php $image_url = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_id,'small');   ?>

Open the template file you want the featured image to appear (remember this can go anywhere within a loop).

Using the Featured Image Function

<?php echo $image_url[0]; ?>

Simply use this tiny snippet anywhere within your loop to display the image source of your featured image. Just remember that this snippet only generates the SOURCE URL, not the actual image.

Now For The Fun Part

The Markup

<a class="feat_img" href="#" style="background-image:url(<?php echo $image_url[0]; ?>);"></a>

With the ability to add the Featured Image source URL at will, we can add it as a background image to any element within the loop. Here we’ve assigned a link element with our featured image as it’s background graphic. Of course without some fancy CSS3 to go with it the link looks awful…

…So Pretty It Up

.feat_img {
      margin:0 0 15px;
      width:264px;
      height:155px;
      border: solid 3px #fff;
      box-shadow: 0px 3px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.3);
      transition: all .5s ease-in-out;
      -moz-transition: all .5s ease-in-out;
      -webkit-transition: all .5s ease-in-out;
      background-position: center center;
      display:block;
}

.feat_img:hover {
      height:300px;
      opacity:0.7;
}

See It In Action

Pretty sweet trick right? I’ve used this trick on my homepage as a way to slowly reveal more of the image upon hovering the post link. Of course you can go wild with this and do just about anything you want.

I’d love to see what you come up with, send over demo links in the comments section!

Some Machine Head inspired art.

Going to see them on Feb.4 2012 at The Palladium in Worchester, MA.

Based off of Machinehead’s newest album, “Unto the Locust” was the ongoing theme here, as the album delivers some utterly ferocious and bleak harmonics I wanted to leave my final interpretation of the lyrics.

A chorus line that particularly caught me:

We build cathedrals to our pain,
Establish monuments to attain,
Freedom from all of the scars and the sins,
Lest, we drown in the darkness within.

I know this is some pretty heavy and morose shit, but the idea of a cathedral literally emerging from your body and being devoured by the apocalyptic swarm of locusts was just too enticing.

Here’s a little youtube love for Machinehead:

RSS Feeds Are Boring

Sure the content contained within them can be pretty fantastic, but the means in which you view the feeds is weak and always has been.

A few months ago I decided that twitter just wasn’t working well enough as a content aggregator. I follow a number of design publications through Twitter for the purpose of seing their latest articles. I also follow idiots like Kenny Powers and Funny or Die + 300 others. So my design content gets lost. (Argue the case of custom lists all you want, they’re not practical) The solution I then found was a web app called NetNewsWire. I spent an hour or so subscribing to all the blogs I wanted to read and it worked out just fine.

A week later, I never opened the app again. I even set it up to open whenever I turned on my machine. Still never checked it. I just couldn’t work it into my routine.

So I let my need to read relavent design articles fester for a while. Until I came across a new feature in the Email Marketing Platform MailChimp. I already knew about the RSS to Email campaigns. That concept was novel and works for a number of people. But I don’t really want to get five emails every morning just to see what a couple pubs wrote about. Until a brand new Vital Design email marketing project introduced me to this badass new feature…

Feed Merge

The possibilities here are endless. Before, you could only subscribe to an email consisting of posts from ONE feed. Now, you can pepper one email template with as many feeds as you want. I will detail how to accomplish this below, but for now just think about the possible applications of this.

Create a Design Digest

The first idea that popped into my head was to aggregate all of the publication feeds that I wanted to read each morning. So I sat down, plugged in the RSS feed URL’s into the code listed below and set-up the email to send to me every morning.

I can now wake up each morning and have a brand new email sitting in my inbox – which I DO actually check everyday – containing the two most recent articles from each of my favorite publications.

No more running News Feeds every morning. Now everything I want is sitting in the one place I do go everyday. My inbox.

How It Works

With a simple short code users can now drop entire entries from any blog they want into an email. Plus the number of sources is unlimited.

Just drop in this code wherever you want the RSS feed to appear:

*|FEED:Feed URL [$count=Number of Posts Included]|*

Feed Merge Individual Items

If the default layout of the basic Feed Merge isn’t looking as clean as you would like it to you’re in luck. The shortcode below will allow you to break the feed up into individual elements. That way you can actually have some aesthetic control over what you’re displaying.

*|FEEDBLOCK:URL|* *|FEEDITEMS:|*
INSERT INDIVIDUAL ITEMS HERE
 *|END:FEEDITEMS|* *|END:FEEDBLOCK|*

For a full list of individual items available in shortcode form – plus a much more in-depth tutorial on how to use this feature head to the Mailchimp Support Page:

Mailchimp Support

Keep It Recurring

One thing you will quickly learn while attempting to build one of these eblasts is that your email will only be delivered when there is new content. This new content must come from the single RSS feed you define in the beginning. So if you’re blog is only going to have new content once a week, your digest only goes out once a week.

In comes Chimpfeedr, the RSS aggregator built by Mailchimp for Mailchimp. Just feed the chimp all of the RSS feeds included in your digest and he will spit out a single aggregated url, which can then then be inserted as your source feed.

So now the digest will only go out when ANY of your news sources publishes new content.

Problem solved!

Get Clever

Creating a simple and customized digest is just the tip of the iceberg with Field Merge. I took a real world problem and used this feature to fix it. To me it’s a game changer. We now have the ability to:

1. Build a custom designed eblast with infinite dynamic content sources
2. Aggregate relevant content the way YOU want it to be display and delivered
3. Give your readers a wider range of related content during your outreach
4. Build a daily relationship with your readers that adds value beyond your content

If you have questions about this feature or would like your clients to see a digest like this come from you. Contact Vital Design here.

Or if you want to subscribe to my Digest featuring this blog, Smashing Magazine, OneExtraPixel, DesignMag, and Inspired Magazine click the link below!

Sign up for Design Essentials Digest!

This project was, and is, top secret but I guarantee this technology will eventually “see” the light of day.

Since I can’t say anything more about the content I will say this. Designing at 300 dpi in Photoshop when the dimensions are that of a friggin wall, will hose your memory. Anyone with pointers on how to work at this size without turning your machine into a Commodore 64 please leave DETAILED comments!

While redesigning my personal site I came across this easy to implement button CSS that gives the illusion of a button being pressed.

The HTML

Simply add a class to your link.

<a href="#" class="readmore">Click Here</a>

The CSS

This is where the fun stuff happens.

First just give the button it’s visual styling. In this case I’m duplicating the grey button effect from my home page slider.

Note the box shadow style. The y-axis distance is set to 3px, which gives the box element a 3px drop shadow on the bottom.

The Rollover

Now, on hover, you will want to again style the visual portion of the button. Then you will need to do two things:

• Position the link “relative” and assign the top to have 3 extra pixels.
• Define the box shadow again, only now set the value to “none”.

This removes the distance of the drop shadow and moves the button down to that equal distance.

.readmore {
background: #2f2f2f;
text-align: center;
display: block;
width: 250px;
border-radius:8px;
-moz-border-radius:8px;
-webkit-border-radius:8px;
box-shadow: 0px 3px 5px #000;
-moz-box-shadow: 0px 3px 5px #000;
-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 3px 5px #000;
}
.readmore:hover {
position:relative;
top:3px;
color: #fqq;
box-shadow:none;
-moz-box-shadow:none;
-webkit-box-shadow:none;
}

In Action

Click Here

This code uses elements that may or may not work in IE7 and lower…oh well.

Inspired by Director Danny Boyle’s latest film “127 Hours” this painting was a labor of love created in the days following my initial viewing of this fantastic Oscar contender. Those unfamiliar with the story, 127 Hours is based on the book written by Aron Ralston, a young engineer who in the spring of 2003 found himself stranded in the caves of Utah’s Canyonland.

I apologize if I skip over the small details of the story, but all you really need to know is that Aron became entrapped in the desert for 127 Hours (a little over five days, put your calculators down) and was faced with a decision that most would likely scoff at or simply say “that sucks”. I know that’s how I felt. Hell the night I saw the movie, I was torn between this and “The Mechanic” the latest mindless action film from Jason Statham. Yet, when I sat down to witness what Aron went through, I was floored.

A film hasn’t hit me like this in years.

It’s difficult to express the litany of emotions the final 30 minutes put me through, so I sat down to do a bit of self examination…and I wound up with a painting that was not planned, just a spontaneous deluge of inspiration coming from a strange place. Most of the movies I watch, last about 3 hours, an hour of which is spent on reflection – and that’s for the ones that are worth a shit – most are not. So the fact that this small scale true story about a guy hugging a boulder for a week – talking to himself – was so violently seared into my brain for an entire weekend, I had to document it.

Life is a funny thing, we wade through our daily lives – focused on the tasks at hand – partnered with that inherent worry about the future, all affected by our infinitely varied pasts. Yet when all is accounted for, your world is flowing perfectly with your wildest hopes and dreams, there is always that nagging fear of the one absolute in life, death.

People structure their entire lives around death, every time you tell yourself not to do something, the reason in the back of your mind is death. Since the dawn of man the butterfly wings of chance have proven time and again to be a force of unpredictable destruction. So we keep things close to the chest, we risk assess, we analyze, we govern with arbitrary laws, we hide in the domestic cave known as life, all in the name of survival.

Somewhere along the way though, the concept of survival was lost in translation.

Keeping ourselves alive is slowly killing us all. Nihilism is running rampant, our safety induced coma is threatening our physiological well-being, and yet we fight to survive by such means. This is how I view the world. You may not, but I see this everyday and for me it is a disheartening truth. This is why we see events like the one unfolding in Egypt. The build up of monotony, coupled with an ever present vice grip on freedom – all in the name of freedom – is driving people out of their coma’s. They are waking up.

Only when we are faced with death, in any of it’s many faces, can we truly change.

” We all have moments that haunt us, yet thanks to a world of distractions, only our subconscious need deal with it.”This is a powerful message, one that Aron Ralston was blessed to give to those who would listen. Aron is not a person that lives the way we (as a populace) do, Aron is an adventurer, a free spirit, and also a flawed figure. We all have moments that haunt us, yet thanks to a world of distractions, only our subconscious need deal with it. Unless of course you are stuck in a hole for 5 days with nothing but your thoughts and a small utility knife…

Hallucinations plagued and entertained Aron throughout those infamous 127 hours, allowing for a painful real-time version of his life flashing before his eyes. Visions that have haunted him are were now his only friends, while memories of pleasure and love seemed almost like a cruel joke. This introspection is what left me in awe of his story. Everyone has a version of “What I Would Do” for nearly every situation, yet it is such a superficial notion when dealing in hypotheticals. Here we have an actual human being, facing down death, and depicted so close to reality that it’s almost as if you are there with Aron. This is why my reaction was so profound. Simply hearing or reading about a story like this will only allow for a modicum of understanding, where seeing and almost feeling all of this first hand, can stick with you forever.

These hallucinations of what was, what is, and what could be, were Aron’s driving force for choosing life – despite it being the more difficult road. The things he saw, were things that any man can relate to, or…cling to.

THE ART

“WHAAAATTTT THE F***********!?!?!?!

Did I really get raped by a vampire?”

Many suns ago her goal was simple, let her voice be heard. And so it was, by quite a few of her friends actually. They would spout off early in the morning about whatever came to mind, typically musing about their chosen craft. Their buzzing at that point was little more than a morning song to the untrained ear. Oddly enough, people could hear them, they knew this much to be true, they simply could never make out a word. Too bad the birds never developed fingers to write with because they do speak the same damn language.

This was their heritage, continuing unabated until a strange night 3 years ago…

After a long day and night of speaking with her friends as they toiled in the brush, gathering for the coming winter. She squatted down to sleep when a dark silhouette of a bird-like creature appeared at the end of her branch. It was sliding stealthily towards her. She struggled to make out who or what it was when…she awoke. For the next three weeks she was haunted by vivid dreams of bird erotica, a dark and handsome creature would seduce her and force her to perform dastardly pornographic things. This struck her as strange, since that’s not really how birds do it.

Upon asking her friends what they thought the dreams could be about, a dear friend posed an interesting hypothesis.

“The elders spoke of a time when the evils of man may steal the voice of the bird only to share their melody amongst one another until the skies turned black and the rivers red.” She continued “that slippery mammalian bastard was likely a vampire in its bat form, sent in to steal your voice”. “That is just plain stupid” our graceful protagonist wailed. “Stupid?” her friend returned, “look down amongst them, they no longer look up to hear our calls, they instead stare downward into their black boxes – walking into one another and not saying so much as a word. Our influence is lost, they are disconnected”.

Perplexed by the theory and just how heavy handed her friend really was, our bird staggered back to her nest where she lay cumbersome atop her newest egg. “How does a vampire bat having sex with a bird lead to the downfall of the human race and all living creatures?”, she pondered aloud. Just then she felt a sharp pain in her ass.

The egg has hatched! What utter terror she next felt, when her newborn chick revealed itself. Into the air she leaped; squirming and screaming “WHAAAATTTT THE F***********!?!?!?!”

– she let out a bird fart.

Epilogue

That malevolent chick would then go on to live as the pet of her father, Dracula, in his palace – where she maintains his Facebook and Twitter page, he now has over 500 million friends.

To view the illustration that inspired this tale, click the image below.

Oh, and this image is mine, I created it, so spread it but don’t steal it.

This is SICK